Discover why a Japanese family are forced to live on a staircase; an elderly woman’s routine slips into anarchy; a teenage couple’s taunting backfires; environmental terror at a Antarctic resort; a threesome goes wildly wrong and more. Life is what happens while we’re busy making other plans. A multifarious mix of stories from satire to tragedy, depicting fancies and failures and the pathways in-between.

‘Langford humanises the dehumanised. Pseudo Stars will make you see people with a new perspective.’ –Pete Malicki, author and playwright

‘From the environmental chaos of the “Last Ice Shelf”, to a poignant journey along “The Long Jetty”, Pseudo Stars takes you to places rarely ventured.’ – Lucy Neville, author

Product description

Product Description

Discover why a Japanese family are forced to live on a staircase; an elderly woman’s routine slips into anarchy; a teenage couple’s taunting backfires; environmental terror at a Antarctic resort; a threesome goes wildly wrong and more. Life is what happens while we’re busy making other plans. A multifarious mix of stories from satire to tragedy, depicting fancies and failures and the pathways in-between.

‘Langford humanises the dehumanised. Pseudo Stars will make you see people with a new perspective.’ –Pete Malicki, author and playwright

‘From the environmental chaos of the “Last Ice Shelf”, to a poignant journey along “The Long Jetty”, Pseudo Stars takes you to places rarely ventured.’ – Lucy Neville, author

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Pseudo Stars, by Anthony J. Langford, is simply one of the most intriguing and masterful short story anthologies I have ever read. It’s as if this author has crept behind the eyes and into the tortured hearts, souls and minds of his subjects. There is so much here to recommend. The stories are mostly brief but they offer snapshots of imaginative, deeply flawed, every day delusional and complex characters on the edge of reality and oftentimes far beyond it. There aren’t many authors who can write with such insight, grace and vigorous intelligence. Pseudo Stars kept me guessing, its stories continued to surprise and beguile me throughout. Simply stunning. Highly, highly recommended.

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Grace Noble

5.0 out of 5 starsA Rollicking Good Time, Full of Insights

27 December 2017 - Published on Amazon.com

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

One might hesitantly assume that the short story form has been circling the drain for some time now, but thanks entirely to a wonderful new collection of stories by Australian author Anthony J. Langford readers who opted to prematurely pronounce the death of the genre are sure to gain a whole new respect for the short story. Langford’s book, Pseudo Stars, subtitled Stories of the Deluded, contains a universe full of colorful characters, each more fascinating than the last.

Langford has skillfully imbued each story, most a mere handful of pages, with a remarkable sense of reality, even when the circumstances of the tale are anything but credible. In “Thirteen Steps: Living on a Stair”, he relays the saga of Chuu and Asami, a Japanese couple living in dire poverty with their two children, Katsumi and Kan. Too poor to rent an apartment of their own, the family lives on a staircase within an apartment building. Some of their life is humorously entertaining (each step is claimed by various family members, and some are dedicated to specific tasks such as home schooling or cooking while another is relegated as a time-out space for their children’s punishment). Despite this seemingly comedic set-up, the dire circumstances of the family play out in an atmosphere of subterfuge and hidden agendas, ultimately tearing the family apart rather than pulling them together.

Pseudo Stars employs a plethora of other fascinating characters as well. There’s “Ding Dong – Man of the Fringe”, an alleged former boxer, whose life as one of the homeless brings with it ridicule from those more fortunate than himself, save our narrator (autobiographically Langford himself?), a seventeen year old boy who sees Ding Dong and his constant companion, Dave, as anything but societal outcasts. His unspoken respect for the men is implied as he joins them repeatedly in what he thinks of as “a parallel universe.” Here, the men’s lack of housing does not deter from their intellect or knowledge. The narrator instead spends months observing and learning about life (and women!) from Dave and his cronies at their makeshift encampment. In a spattering of pages Langford draws the reader into a world most know little about, and, as in life, his story ends in a cipher rather than the fairy tale ending most readers have come to expect in today’s market.

The freshness of Langford’s characters pops from the page, and each of the twenty-plus tales features memorable and vibrant people you may not think of as someone you want to get to know but, inevitably, you’ll find yourself glad to have heard from each. There’s Dax, the gay-for-pay porn actor who only wants some cash to buy his girlfriend some gifts and ends up with an entirely different life than he expected; there’s the oh-so-structured lady of “Creatures of Habitual” who lives her life with the OCD precision of an Italian railroad, obviously just waiting to be derailed; there’s also the somewhat crass (unnamed) narrator of “The Elusive” whose vacillating views on women, and especially his obsession de nuit, reveal real raw emotional truths about how little humanity has come as a species when defining honor and respect towards women and relationships in general. It is clear that this particular man doesn’t care squat about the woman who is the target of his lust anymore than he does the partner she is already with; on the other extreme is the anonymous narrator of “The Long Jetty.” Decades older than the fellow at the heart of “The Elusive,” the elderly man here could (hopefully) be the same person, now evolved by having experienced true love and then, sadly, loss. His infirmities may be the source of his grumpy demeanor, but it’s the memories of his dead wife Susan that tear at the fabric of who he is, and that loss remains the center of his existence.

The analytical reader will recognize that there is an overarching sense of melancholy to many of these stories, a real feeling of regret coupled with a good dose of “what if” for the characters, whose individual paths have altered the presumed course of their lives. It is a testament to Langford’s talent that he can, in just a few scenes, invoke such heady emotions about the people of whom he writes. It is natural to yearn for more in these stories; each could easily be expanded to a longer form, whether novella or full-on novel form, but to do so would do a disservice to Langford’s talents as exhibited here. What he has gifted the audience with is a stimulus to use their own imaginations to decide the next steps these people are to take, and that is a prospect almost as engrossing as reading Pseudo Stars itself.

Pseudo Stars, by Anthony J. Langford, is simply one of the most intriguing and masterful short story anthologies I have ever read. It’s as if this author has crept behind the eyes and into the tortured hearts, souls and minds of his subjects. There is so much here to recommend. The stories are mostly brief but they offer snapshots of imaginative, deeply flawed, every day delusional and complex characters on the edge of reality and oftentimes far beyond it. There aren’t many authors who can write with such insight, grace and vigorous intelligence. Pseudo Stars kept me guessing, its stories continued to surprise and beguile me throughout. Simply stunning. Highly, highly recommended.